“Under your foot,” Przemyslaw replied
dryly. I still had a lot to learn about wolf tracking.

Notwithstanding my clumsiness I had learnt a great deal about wolves
and wolf tracking in my short stay in Poland. It had been a steep learning
curve for me as I knew next to nothing about Poland let alone wolves.

I arrived in Poland scantily prepared: the currency
was zloty, Lech Walesea was from Gdansk and the Polish army had charged
the German panzer
tanks on horseback. Drudging my memory and browsing through guidebooks
I discovered that I knew more than I thought. Chopin and Copernicus were
both Polish, as is the Pope. But much of it, sadly, made depressing reading,
not least the ghettos of Warsaw as portrayed in the ‘Pianist’ and
the death camps, most notably Auschwitz. Some six million Poles died
in World War II.

Yet in spite of such history and undiscovered
jewels such as Krakow I had not come to enjoy Poland’s cultural
heritage but rather its fascinating flora and fauna, in particular
the forest of Bialoweiza and
Bieszczady National Park. Impossible to pronounce (best attempted with
a drunken Sean Connery accent), these two areas offer unique wildlife
and landscapes within a couple of hours from the UK.

With jagged mountains, vast unspoiled beech forests
and mountain meadows, the Bialoweiza Primeval Forest, straddling the
Polish-Belarussian border,
is the largest and best-preserved fragment of ancient European lowland
forest and is home to many big ungulates like red deer, roe deer, wild
boar and European bison. Yes that’s right bison, perhaps better
associated with the plains of North America than the forests of Europe,
bison once inhabited much of Europe but can now only be found in eastern
Poland.

My guidebook intrigued me by describing Bialoweiza
as a ‘primeval
forest’ but what it failed to explain is what is a primeval forest?
My imagination immediately conjured up Tolkeinesque images of somewhere
that was dark, forbidding, the realm of trolls and other such evil spirits.
The reality was very different in very fact much lighter than I had expected.
This is in part due to the age of the forest – there is no uniformity,
trees have not been planted at the same time, four hundred year old trees
come crashing to the ground clearing great swathes of the forest.

Despite the light it was not easy to navigate
and within minutes I was regretting my neglect of childhood fairy tales – Hansel
would undoubtedly have come better prepared. Thankfully I did not have
to pay too dearly
for my schoolboy error - Andrez, my guide, pulled out his compass and
smiled ruefully.

That was the last and only time that Andrez showed any sign of doubt.
As a guide he was both informative and illuminating, his knowledge encyclopedeaic
if a little earnest. He explained that a fifth of the biomass is deadwood,
120 cubic metres per hectare. The importance of this is not just pure
statistics but rather the biodiversity and the life that this deadwood
sustains. For Andrez the main value of such deadwood is the continuity
of the natural process. He stressed again and again how everything was
interconnected, continually emphasising the importance of the cycle.
The deadwood gives rise to mushrooms, which in turn leads to an abundance
of caterpillars. The caterpillars result in a high density of song birds
but it is the raptors who do best of all as the caterpillars east all
the leaves and hence there is little protection for the songbirds who
are easy prey.

The biodiversity of a temperate zone such as that
of Bialoweiza cannot compete with the biodiversity of the tropics,
whether in quantitative
or qualitative terms. The fungi and ungulates of Poland are not as ‘sexy’ as
the headline-grabbing chimpanzees of Equatorial Africa and the tree frogs
of Guyana. But this does not make the biodiversity of the temperate zone
any less valuable. Although it might have less diversity to that of the
tropics it is still irreplaceable – if we lose what little we have
then there will be nothing left. Czeslaw Milosz, Poland’s Noble
prize-winning poet, has compared the biodiversity of Bialoweiza to Castle
Vavel, a historical monument and national treasure in Krakow. He says
that denuding the forest and its slow destruction is like taking the
castle apart brick by brick by brick.

I found myself won over by Andrez’s earnest message and intrigued
by the minutiae of the forest. I was not so interested in seeing bison
or hearing the rutting cry of red deer – much bigger than our roe
deer – but it was the detail of Bialoweiza that fascinated and
captivated me. Bialoweiza surprised me, but more than anything I surprised
myself by how taken I was by fungi and deadwood, especially given the
fact that I had given up biology at the age of twelve. I was curious
to see whether Bieszczady would hold the same attraction.

Driving down to Bieszczady in the south-eastern corner of Poland I was
struck by the contrast between city and countryside. Whilst Warsaw with
its hip-hop bars is striving to break into the 21st century, the country
is struggling to make it into the 20th century. A report from the United
Nations telecoms agency ITU shows that only 0.03 percent of the Polish
population has access to wide-band internet, putting the country in 63rd
place worldwide, just behind Guam, Nicaragua, the Solomon Islands and
Lebanon.

Much more tangibly there was a palpable lack of
industry in the countryside, which seemed to be gripped by malaise
and wearied by years of communism.
This was perhaps unsurprising given that hundreds of thousands of people
were forcibly moved during Soviet times to the countryside and hence
they have little empathy or understanding of the countryside and traditional
farming techniques. A sad dejected air permeated everything even the
police and their attempts at curbing speeding motorists – a cardboard
cut-out of a police car on the side of the road that would have been
amusing had it not been quite so pathetic.

In contrast to the biomass of Bialoweiza, my time
in Bieszczady was focused more on wildlife. Perhaps unsurprisingly
given there was such
an abundance of wildlife – I had not expected such a wealth and
breadth of wildlife in Poland.

We started along a track at the back of the farm
and I thought that Przemek was leading me up the garden path both metaphorically
and literally.
Thankfully I was wrong and as I was to discover there were signs of wildlife
all around us that I was simply not aware of. “There has been a
lot of rain,” I noted lamely of the flooded fields around us. “No
it’s not rain but is flooded by beavers,” said Przemek as
he led me over to a beaver dam, explaining that beavers use the dam not
only as a means of defence but also as a larder in winter in which they
store small logs on the bottom of the dam.

Minutes later we came across red deer tracks. “Where there are
deer there will be wolves,” Przemek pronounced. He was not wrong
and sure enough we found wolf tracks. On the other side of the path Przemek
pointed out fox scat and the more dainty prints of the fox. He was in
his element, focused on the path ahead, gleaning the muddy track for
signs and information whilst giving me an impressive commentary of what
he was finding. “Foxes defecate on the side of the path. To mark
their territory.” “Wolf scat will often contain feathers
or fur in it.” “A wolf steps in its own tracks.” “ Often
one wolf walks on the path as the others walk alongside the path, sometimes
in and amongst the trees.”

Soon we left the path and were trudging through
the woods. A stream gurgled noisily at the bottom of the steep ravine
to our left. The dappled
light through the trees highlighted the decadence of autumn, the russets,
browns and oranges. But such thoughts were of a secondary concern, my
main focus was straining every sinew to listen and constantly scanning
the surrounding undergrowth. It was clear from Przemek’s heightened
alertness that there was or had been an animal in the vicinity very recently.

“Smell that?” Przemek asked. I sniffed the air and caught
a strong pungent whiff of a smell that I can only describe as animalistic. “Bear,” he
said almost inaudibly. My heart almost skipped a beat.

And then we came across the tracks, they were
of a bear and her cub. I was impressed by the sheer size of the bear
tracks, especially the
claws. The track was easily the size of the span of my hand and scarily
much bigger than I had imagined. My thoughts quickly ran amok – how
big was the bear. What would I do if I saw a bear now? Przemek’s
joke of “How fast can you run?” did little to calm my nerves.

We didn’t see any bears that day but it almost didn’t
matter. I had leaned a huge amount in a small time, had tremendous
fun and any
disappointment of not seeing a bear or wolf was more than offset by the
thrill of the chase, which was quite simply exhilarating. Wonderful countryside
and scenery, fantastic flora, fauna and forest brought to life by some
excellent local guides, namely Przemek and Andrez, more than made up
for the unpronounceable names and the drab image of Poland. But more
than anything what my time in Poland did do was invigorate me and make
me far more aware of my surrounds. I will go back to Poland but this
time much better prepared.